Peter Saul

It was probably in the course of the 1960s that painting, too, entered that loop of permanent recourse and constant transformation which – in contrast to the hypothesis of progress – is regarded as the working basis of postmodernism. Peter Saul (*1934 in San Francisco) is one of the most important protagonists of this upheaval, which is often wrongly associated exclusively with the emergence of Pop art. With his work as both painter and draughtsman, Peter Saul has created a complex amalgam of high and counter-culture that unites comics, Pop, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism with the radical (and at times trivial) social criticism of the Haschrebellen. Naturally such a painter was never an advocate of the American deployment of troops in Vietnam, never a partisan of Reagan or of the Bushes, yet to reduce his work politically to agitprop would be to overlook the hedonistic impulse of an at times baroque delight in composition in his pictures. Following publications in the USA on the work of recent years, the first solo exhibition in Europe, conceived by Martina Weinhart and the Schirn, together with the catalogue now brings the work of the 1960s in particular into focus, when sex and crime, politics, drugs, karma and revolt were only just beginning to penetrate the world in oil. With some of Saul’s works, connoisseurs are reminded by their pastel palette of Philip Guston, the other great US painter of late fame. Asked about this, Peter Saul said only: “Guston’s pictures never interested me; to my mind they are too softcore. His attitude towards the subject is too cheerful for me. The apocalyptic mood suits me better. I like to laugh at bad news.”

Exhibitions:
Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2/6 – 3/9/2017
Deichtorhallen Hamburg/Sammlung Falckenberg, 30/9/2017 – 28/1/2018